Bob Kerr: It’s war today, but tomorrow could be different

Wednesday

Sep 4, 2013 at 12:01 AM

John Kerry is tough to pin down between war and peace. He was a hero once, sort of. In the early ’70s, he was the guy in the fatigues with the patrician accent throwing the fraudulence of the Vietnam...

By Bob Kerr

John Kerry is tough to pin down between war and peace.

He was a hero once, sort of. In the early ’70s, he was the guy in the fatigues with the patrician accent throwing the fraudulence of the Vietnam War back into the faces of Congress. He went on late-night television to debate a guy who dressed well and argued for a “just peace.” Kerry was the public face of Vietnam Veterans Against The War.

But time has not been kind to Kerry or his rebel credentials. There were those of us who wondered how a guy who went to Vietnam managed to come back with home movies of his time in combat. When he ran for president, we got to see him with a rocket launcher over his shoulder. The question jumps out at us: Who the heck was behind the camera and was Kerry thinking “campaign commercial” even while he was fighting the war?

Then there was the question of his medals. In the heated, volatile days of protest by Vietnam veterans in Washington in 1971, hundreds of veterans walked to the steps of the Capitol and threw their medals back at the country that had betrayed them.

Kerry did or did not throw his medals, depending on when he was asked and what he was running for. Yes, he did throw, but he threw only ribbons and not the actual medals. Or he threw a friend’s medals. Or he never threw the medals because he values them too highly.

Take your pick.

Eventually, many of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War felt they had been badly used by their onetime star.

Kerry was a senator, of course, when President George W. Bush decided to wage war in Iraq over those phantom weapons of mass destruction. And Kerry was for the war at first, then he was against it.

Now, as of today, he’s for the United States going to war in Syria. He’s secretary of state and he’s on more talk shows than Al from Cranston, making the case that we have to strike back at the Syrian government. Watching him, comparing him with the guy in fatigues more than 40 years ago, it seems he has lost something off his verbal fastball. He looks a little tight. He doesn’t bring that Yalie drawl to the discussion. He seems far from the antiwar passions that shaped his early celebrity and made him a national figure.

I first met him in 1972 when he was running for Congress, and there he provided an early glimpse into that amazing ability to go whichever way best served the moment. He considered running in one Massachusetts district, then another, before finally deciding on the 5th District, which takes in Lowell and Lawrence. He got beat. His brother getting caught in the basement of his opponent’s campaign headquarters didn’t help.

But Kerry kept running, of course. He served as Massachusetts lieutenant governor and U.S. senator. He ran for president but couldn’t seem to make any serious decisions without checking in with five consultants and a half-dozen focus groups. He accomplished what seemed the impossible and lost to George W. Bush.

Now, he’s out beating the war drums as secretary of state. Forty-two years after asking “How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”, he is pushing for yet another mistake that men, and women, can die for.